On paper, the redevelopment of the old Marriott at Hampden and I-25 looks like a dream deal for southeast Denver, complete with luxury apartments boasting “curated amenities” and a “lazy river” winding through the place. But Holly Ridge residents say that the project has been a nightmare for the neighborhood,…
Launched in 1983 by a group of Kentucky Fried Chicken investors, the Corrections Corporation of America is celebrating its thirtieth anniversary this year with plenty of celebrations and speeches. But there’s one gift the world’s largest private-prison operator isn’t eager to open — a new report by the incarceration reformers…
They started out questioning the ability of Denver city officials to trade a formerly designated natural area for an office building. But opponents of the Hentzell Park land swap now have another bone to pick with Denver Clerk and Recorder Debra Johnson, claiming that her rejection of their efforts to…
In a stunning defeat for the beleaguered coal industry, a southeast Colorado utility group has agreed to shut down a troubled coal-fired power plant, as well as to pay $325,000 in legal fees to environmental groups who challenged the plant in court over emission violations. The settlement also calls for…
Five years after an Arapahoe County jury decided that that he should be executed for murder, transcripts and other records in the case of Sir Mario Owens remain sealed under a court order that prohibits journalists, death penalty activists or even the defendant’s family from viewing them — an unprecedented…
Can an elected coroner be held liable for the destruction of key evidence — a piece of a dead man’s aorta — needed in a medical malpractice lawsuit? That’s the six-figure question at the heart of a federal claim against Adams County and James Hibbard, its former coroner. Hibbard hasn’t…
In his nearly thirty years at the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office, Jeff Shrader has been involved in just about every public aspect of the agency’s operation, from running its jail to supervising investigations to overseeing a $35 million construction project and the creation of a regional crime lab. But for…
Denver residents have roamed, biked and ridden horses along the natural area adjoining Paul A. Hentzell Park for decades. Now, Denver District Judge Herbert Stern must decide if that usage — along with some signage, maps and other historical reference points — do indeed make a park out of a…
This week’s cover story, “The Insider,” profiles Colorado Oil and Gas Association president Tisha Schuller, whose efforts to defend her industry’s strong presence in the state have been made tougher by the fallout from Josh Fox’s antifracking documentary Gasland. That film “has really changed the conversation” about using hydraulic fracturing…
It’s not exactly news that oil-and-gas companies involved in hydraulic fracturing spend freely on lobbyists and political-campaign contributions. A 2011 Common Cause study calculated that the fracking industry had spent close to $750 million over the previous decade seeking to influence federal legislation, such as the 2005 law that exempted…
Fracktivists call it poison. Governor John Hickenlooper sips a special formulation of it like a fine craft beer. But what’s really in the billions of barrels of fracking fluid that oil-and-gas drillers are pumping into the ground across the country? The simple answer is water — and a little something…
In business, as in politics and romance, candor can be a liability rather than an asset. Tisha Schuller discovered just how explosive her own words could be at an energy conference in Denver two years ago, when a few comments about the industry’s most inflammatory critics started a firestorm of…
The year began with Manuel Rodriguez being strapped into a restraint chair. It ended with Rodriguez back in the chair. At Colorado’s state supermax prison, inmates get into confrontations with guards — over food, hygiene, privileges, a refusal to “cuff up” or whatever — out of boredom, mental illness or…
Any government functionary worth his or her bennies knows that the ideal time for a document dump — a release of some embarrassing matter you really don’t want to talk about — is late on Friday afternoon. And that goes double for the report Colorado Attorney General John Suthers saw…
Governor John Hickenlooper confounded death-penalty advocates and opponents alike last month when he granted a reprieve but not clemency to Nathan Dunlap, who’d been scheduled for execution in August for the 1993 murders of four people. Now David Isberg is hoping the governor will intervene to prevent another “death sentence”…
A long-awaited report by the National Academy of Sciences on the federal government’s efforts to manage herds of wild horses across the West is finally out, and it confirms what mustang advocates have been saying for years: The Bureau of Land Management program is poorly managed, relies on an unsustainable…
A lawsuit filed by a citizens’ group, seeking to put the brakes on a plan by Denver city officials to swap an open space area in the Cherry Creek corridor for an office building, contends that Mayor Michael Hancock’s administration has violated a provision of the city charter that prohibits…
The City of Longmont has been criticized and sued — once by the state, once by the Colorado Oil and Gas Association — over its citizens’ decision last fall to ban fracking within the city limits. That’s discouraged other local governments along the Front Range that have been thinking about…
Some stories are worth revisiting — not just for the writing, although we like to think we do a good job on that, but for the people whose remarkable efforts and sacrifices make them worth writing about. And that’s why I’m particularly pleased to offer a shameless plug for a…
Filmmakers Josh Fox and Phelim McAleer are having quite an argument, but mostly on film and not in the same room. Both men will be in Boulder tonight at the same time to present documentaries that claim to expose the truth about using hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in natural gas…
A much-contested deal to trade eleven acres of open space in the Cherry Creek corridor for an office building in central Denver, pushed by Mayor Michael Hancock and approved by city council in April, has triggered not one but two citizen petition drives to nix the swap and protect the…
A new government report on the rate of sexual victimization in America’s jails and prisons lists the Denver Women’s Correctional Facility as having the highest rate of sexual assault and misconduct by staff of any lockup in the nation — four times the national average, in fact. That figure is…
